The control panels situated in an aircraft pilot cockpit are composed of a great number of control devices placed in a very small space so that they can be managed by the pilots, which means their design is complicated. Even though said complexity suggests the use of simulation systems during the design process, there are not any simulation systems known for aircraft pilot cockpits or for control panels for other complex systems.
In fact, in the case of aircrafts, the design process of the cockpits consists of two steps:                The execution of a graphic design of the cockpit panels by a specialized design team.        The construction of the cockpit panels based on said graphic design.        
This means that the responsibility of obtaining an optimum design is concentrated in the graphic design step, as any subsequent change that might be needed would require a change in the already constructed cockpit.
In the prior art there are known virtual panels constructed by using ad-hoc computer programs written using programming languages with graphic libraries such as OpenGL, DirectX, Java2D/Java3D. FIG. 1 shows an example of a cockpit made using these programs with basic elements which are not representative in size and location for enabling the evaluation of a real cockpit.
In the prior art there are also known virtual panels constructed using WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) tools usually employed in the design of graphic interfaces such as Views, SL-GMS, ó GV.net. FIG. 2 shows an example of a panel developed using the SL-GMS graphic library. These tools have a limited number of graphic elements. They do not contain the necessary controls needed to design a cockpit and they are not representative for carrying out cockpit design evaluations.
In the first case, general purpose technologies are used so they are not appropriate for aircraft cockpits/consoles or any other complex control centre, which have very specific problems; and in the second case, they are technologies applied to the specific environment to which they are destined and there are none, as said before, oriented towards aircraft cockpits/consoles.
Given the time and the costs employed in the design process of aircraft cockpits used nowadays by aircraft manufacturers, there is a great demand for methods and systems which may reduce them, and the present invention is oriented toward satisfying said demand.